Letter: Making a solar water heater from plastic bottles

A reader recalls a solar water heater being installed in a local school swimming pool back in the late 1960s

Dear Editor

Growing up in Sussex in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s there was an article in the local paper (The Sussex Express and County Herald), with photograph, showing how the parents of children at a local school (Chyngton, as I recall) had constructed a heating system for the school swimming pool by running a black hose pipe through glass bottles with the bases removed.

The bottles were arranged on the roof of the changing room, with the hosepipe snaking from row to row. I do not know how long it survived vandalism, but it is an example I have referred to regularly over the years in discussions of small scale energy schemes.

ECOLOGIST COOKIES

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